


The Naming of Things

by fresne



Category: 1602
Genre: Gen, Podfic Available, Yuletide, challenge:Yuletide 2006, recipient:Brighid
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-12-22
Updated: 2006-12-22
Packaged: 2017-10-09 20:21:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,467
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/91207
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fresne/pseuds/fresne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hank contemplates Man or Beast, while collecting some small turnips thrown his way at the local market, for what college student is not in wont of funds and sustenance.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Naming of Things

**Author's Note:**

> [podcast](http://fresne.podbean.com/mf/play/fhp2v/the_naming_of_things.mp3)
> 
> The following are inspiration for this work and inspiration for my dialogue, where I am not directly quoting, because apt quotes are cool:  
> Gaiman's 1602,  
> Marvelverse  
> Dante Aligheri, Inferno, III, XXXIV  
> Aristophanes  
> Pliny  
> Thomas Bacon

Is it man or beast? A philosophical question to be sure, and even if then the answer was to be beast, perhaps the better question was if there be faculty to rise to the better angels of his nature. For was not man a form of beast? For all that man, he, or she, or it, or permutations and complications of same, had named all things in a mongrel polyglot cacophony.

Hank ducked a crumbled brick and considered the bravura of daring to name a thing. Eyes to the heavens and depths, a bare fraction of the total. Everything that walked and swam and crawled and swept the sky.

Which returned to the essential question, was it man or beast? The desire to name and thus divide.

The turnip would have caught him square in the forehead had he not snatched it from the air. Hank said, "I thank you good woman for providing this poor student of natural philosophy with some small sustenance this day. For I know with winters long and stretching each year, crops are sparse and difficult to come by." Then he bit into the turnip. It was hard. Weathered from too long a time in some sparse cellar, but it was sustenance for the body that the mind could continue to soar.

The rest of the market day crowd gave their own contributions, in equal part rocks and vegetation. The produce he caught and the rest he returned to the ground from whence they came. It was not his aim to rile the crowd to more than some meager repast.

Thus word and thought into deed, he cached his findings about his person and caught the lip of the nearby wall and followed the chimney sweeps steps up onto the roof of the world, or more accurately the roof of Edinburgh, his small corner of the world. No man an island, for all the Hank lived upon an island.

He leapt lightly from the roof top to catch a corbelled cupola for star gazing and then on to further roof tops.

When he had come to Edinburgh in search of an education, Hank thoughts had been to books rather than feats of prestidigitation. However, as he leaped from brick to slate to wood, it seemed as if one was intimately tied to the other. The alignment of physical activity and mind.

He dropped from the roof to the window sill of his loft rooms upon the sixth floor of a building more valued for its proximity to the university than its resplendent odor. That and its sparsity of required remuneration. For all that most caviled to climb six flights of stairs to lodgings, Hank never used them. The tall roof tops of Edinburgh were his solitary road.

He swung in the window, but left the wooden shutters open for the illumination that the day might bring to the garret of the damned.

For in the manner of college students, they so liked to refer to it.

Having placed upon the door in the finest of copperplate script, "Dinanzi a me non fuor cose create, se non etterne, e io etterna duro. Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch' entrante." or for the more natally language minded, "Before me nothing was created, but eternal things and I endure eternally. Abandon every hope, ye that enter."

Hank had argued for, "Once more to see again the stars," that like good gartered knights of thought they might aim for more celestial spheres. However, Anthony had over ruled him, and as good Master Stark owned the building, then in the manner of all good merchant princes, he got to name their lodgings. Although the reflection that if Machiavelli thought it was better to be feared than loved, he'd never had stones thrown at him in a village market. An experience that Hank found significantly broadening to the philosophically minded.

All these thoughts, and some other strays meandered, while Anthony failed to look up from the project that he was currently tinkering. Some brass device of perpetual motion. He was also nursing a leather sack, and the day not yet half over. But then for Anthony it was still the night before.

Anthony glanced up as Hank made a space among the metal for some small morsels of a more digestible nature. Anthony said, "We've got coin for food."

"Corrections, you have coin for food, I am of humbler birth," said Hank. He diced his vegetable haul for stew. Anthony looked in need of food and a break. His lips stained with wine and his fingers grained with grease. "Anyway, it was a beautiful day for a stroll among the good citizens of our metropolis as a respite from our studies. It is a beautiful day for skylarking under the rare sun. You should try it."

"We don't all have your skill at blind leaps of faith," said Anthony putting aside a small pliers to lean back in his chair.

Hank sent root vegetation to their watery doom in a small pot on top of their brazier. "Don't forget my simian cognition." Food beginning its bubbling way, Hank looked at his friend. Pale faced and puffy eyed. Hank said, "I know that university students are supposed to be renown for their drunken debauch, but combining mechanics and alcohol would seem to be a recipe of some peril."

Anthony shrugged, "Drink wine, and you will sleep well. Sleep, and you will not sin. Avoid sin, and you will be saved. Ergo, drink wine and be saved. Some proverb or another." Anthony drank a sip of wine and rubbed his eyes.

"Not the best argument under the circumstances my friend." Hank stirred the pot. "However, Titus Maccius would tell us that the great evil of wine is that it first seizes the feet, it is a crafty wrestler, thus I assume why you are still sitting."

"When men drink, then they are rich and successful and win lawsuits and are happy and help their friends." Stark waved his hand at their present loft. "Quickly, bring me a beaker of wine, so that I may wet my mind and say something clever. Aristophanes."

"While Diogenes would have it that he liked best the wine drunk at the cost of others, this cost is at times too high." Hank picked up Anthony's current puzzle of mechanics.

"In vino vertias. Pliny." Anthony drank from his sack. "It helps me think."

"I should think the opposite. For when the wine is in, the wit is out. Thomas Bacon." Hank turned the device over in his hand. "This for example is not your finest work." He held his hand spread and gently touched the moving pieces. It hardly budged. "Motion at all will be difficult, much less perpetual."

Anthony gave Hank the long bowman's salute and took back his toy.

But they'd had this conversation before, and would again. So Hank assumed his favorite perch to read Galen De Fabrica, which would be under discussion tomorrow, occasionally reaching down to stir the pot.

He was deep into the study of the spinal cord of the Barbary Ape, when Anthony said, "Do you ever wonder why?" Anthony was staring at the white washed wall. He'd taken the toy apart again.

"Ah, we come to the philosophical depths of the wine," said Hank. He dropped to the floor as a courtesy. Also for the greater ease of tasting their repast. Soup is not easily eaten upside down.

"I mean look at you." Anthony waved at Hank, nearly over setting the brazier and pot. "You cannot attend classes openly without being branded a witch, while no one gives me a second glance. But are we any different under the skin?"

Hank took the sack from Anthony and drank a swallow. He said, "There comes a time twixt life and death when all men stop to catch their breath . We ask the stars, why. We question our lot. The heavens open wide and reply, why not." Hank shrugged. "Man or beast?"

"I would be an automaton." Anthony spun a fragile gear upon the rough wood. "Like the golem of old Prague." Then he swept the metal to the floor in a shower. "You should be the brooding one, while I the happy skylark."

Hank ladled some soup into a bowl, added some small herbs, and handed it to Anthony. "Perhaps and perhaps not according to some lower devils of our natures. Now then over this freely given meal of neighboring generosity, explain to me the principles of your machine."

Anthony snorted, but he ate his soup and explained until sleep and the mild soporific in the soup over took him. Hank tucked him into his pallet and decided to resume Galen from the chimney top.

It was a beautiful day.

**Author's Note:**

> If after reading my fiction here, you would like to read more about me and my writing check out my profile.


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